


It's Hard To Sleep With An Attractive Woman In Your Bed

by Zaffie



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Adorably Romantic Selfies, Damn; Ward Makes A Good Pillow, F/M, Living In The Van, Skye Kicks People In Her Sleep, Snuggle Time Is Compulsory, Van Life, Ward's Enjoying This More Than He Thought He Would
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-04
Updated: 2014-01-09
Packaged: 2018-01-07 10:19:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1118743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zaffie/pseuds/Zaffie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ward doesn't know why he's stuck on a solid mattress in a van with a hacker sitting on his chest, but he knows that none of this would ever have happened to him before Skye joined SHIELD. Never. </p><p>(Is it bad that he can't decide whether he's thrilled or furious that he's in this situation?)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Teaching A Robot To Snuggle (Is Easier Than It Sounds)

**Author's Note:**

> So, I've seen a few fics (okay, several) floating around which involve Skye having nowhere to stay, and ending up living with Ward (or anyone else on the team). I figured - why not turn this on its head? - so I had Ward going to live in the van with Skye for a little while. 
> 
> Honestly, Skye seems way more independant than him anyway, as far as I'm concerned, so it all makes sense in my brain.
> 
> There's a pun in the title somewhere, but I'll be damned if I can find it.

Ward protests to the snuggles at first.

     “What?” Skye says, trying to put as much scorn into her voice as possible. “Aren’t you secure enough in your masculinity to allow a girl to use you as a pillow in a purely platonic way?” Or something along those lines.

     “I’m not comfortable,” Ward responds. “You have at least five elbows, and three of them are in my groin.”

     “Well I am comfortable on you,” Skye retorts. “So toughen up, my friend.”

 

Now, Ward passively accepts snuggle time as a necessary evil. Skye will charge into the lounge, usually when he’s reading, and announce that she wants to go online and write aggressive forum posts and will Ward please lie down so that she can get comfortable?

     Ward moves along the couch so that she has room to sidle in beside him and then he reads and she types. Sometimes, when she gets really worked up about something, she hits things nearby. Usually, that’s him. Ward’s learnt to ignore it.

 

“We’re going to the Hub,” Coulson announces when he walks into the lounge that morning during designated snuggle time.

     “Sir?” Ward questions, looking up from his book instantly. Skye ignores both of them.

     “It’s classified,” Coulson explains, with a grimace that says he wishes it wasn’t. “Only Agent May and I will be needed; the rest of you get to scatter and find places to stay for three or four days.”

     “No problem,” Skye says at once, her eyes still on the computer. She’s _typing_ while she’s talking, which is weird and should never be done. Ever. “My van is there, right? I can stay in that.”

     “You can’t stay in a _van_ ,” Ward laughs.

     “Sure I can! Watch me.”

     Ward looks at Coulson, who shrugs. “She probably can,” he says apologetically. “Fitzsimmons have housing space in the Hub itself, so it’s easy for them. What about you, Agent Ward?”

     “I guess I can find somewhere,” Ward says quickly.

     “He’s all alone,” Skye contradicts, seeing through him as always. “He might be lonely. This could lead to tears.”

     “There will be no tears!” Ward insists, trying to regain control of the situation.

     “It’s okay,” the rookie agent says, closing her laptop and sliding off his lap. “You can stay with me.”

 

It takes them nearly a day to reach the Hub, and somehow, Ward expects that in that time he will come up with a better solution. He’s so sure that he’ll work something out that he devotes almost no time or brainpower to thinking about the problem, and is surprised (he probably shouldn’t be) when they begin their descent and he has no idea where he will stay.

     After they’ve landed, he goes down the stairs to the lab. Skye is sitting on a high stool and braiding Simmons’ hair while the scientists talk a mile a minute.

     “They’re arguing again,” Skye tells him when he comes in. “Are you packed?”

     “I can’t stay with you,” he tries.

     “You have nowhere else to go.”

     It’s a sad truth. Ward goes upstairs to pack.

 

“You have to come and visit!” Simmons calls after them as the groups move away from each other.

     “Absolutely,” Fitz agrees, trailing after May and Coulson towards the large collection of buildings. Skye and Ward move the other way, towards one of many car parks.

     “Is there a bed in your van?” he asks.

     “Yes.”

     “A couch?”

     Skye thinks about it for a moment. “Nope.”

     “So where will I sleep?”

     She grins. “With me! It’s like a permanent snuggle time.”

     “No. Absolutely not. No.” Ward cannot state enough how much is wrong with this situation.

     “Look, grumpy-pants, I – well, I don’t have a good reason why you should agree with me. So you can sleep on the floor for three nights if you want.”

     Ward is slightly concerned that he’s won this argument so easily. It’s possible that Skye is sick, he thinks. She _never_ gives up.

 

When he sees the floor of her van, he understands. It’s – well, it’s the floor of a van, covered in papers and shoes and thumb tacks. There is no way he’s going to be sleeping there tonight. Still, he keeps up the pretence.

     “Could you at least move the pins, Skye?”

     “Scared of pain, robot?” She kicks a pile of paper into a corner and snatches up a black boot by the ridiculously thin stiletto heel. “Do you see another one of these anywhere?”

     “I’m not a robot,” he retorts. “I bleed when people stab me with thumb tacks.”

     “I think it’s lost,” the woman sighs. She throws the boot away and it clatters into her desk. “Just dump your bag wherever. Look around, if you want. I’m going to check stuff.” She gestures towards the computer and then she sits down in front of it and begins to power it up.

     Ward knows he won’t get anything sensible out of her until she’s finished… whatever it is she wants to do, so he puts his bag on the floor like Skye suggested. Finally, he’s free to look around her van – her home. It’s funny to imagine her living here, all alone, without the rest of their team. They really have become co-dependent, haven’t they? That worries him; but he can’t deny how much the thought of a lonely Skye sitting in this van hurts him.

     Her computer is sitting on a fold-up desk at the farthest end from the driver’s seat and steering wheel. There’s a curtain between the driving area and living space, and her bed is along the side wall. Really, it feels way more spacious than it is in there. It’s something to do with the way Skye has decorated the place. She’s stuck printed documents to the inside of the door, and when Ward leans closer he sees that many of them are SHIELD related. It’s a timeline of Skye’s search for her past. On the bed’s headboard there are medals and ribbons. They’re from school swimming carnivals, or athletic carnivals, and he’s startled to notice that for someone who complains endlessly about physical training, Skye won a lot of these competitions.

     The wall above the bed is covered in photos. Some of them are people he doesn’t recognise, some are Skye with still more unfamiliar faces, and a few of them are of children. When he peers closer, he spots Skye’s cheeky face shining out of some of the child pictures. There’s one of her as a toddler, with her little chin covered in cake and her dark hair cut in a straight fringe over her eyebrows. Another one shows her in the middle of a group of kids in swimming costumes. Skye isn’t one of the biggest there, but she’s the one with the most personality, Ward thinks. Her mouth is twisted in a mischevious smirk and her hands are clasped behind her.

     He’s not prepared for the _thud_ his heart gives when he catches sight of a photo of Miles. _Damn_.

     “Yeah, I should take that down, huh?” His face must have given something away, or maybe Skye just read his mind. “It’ll leave a gap.”

     “Take one with me,” Ward offers, driven by jealousy, probably.

     “Good idea,” she grins, and he sees that funny little girl in her eyes. “Hang on.” She rips the picture of Miles down without ceremony, and then she steps over to the driver’s seat and grabs a camera from the dashboard. It’s one of those old-fashioned ones that spits the picture out instantly, and so she holds it up and steps close to Ward. “Ready?” she says, and right before she presses the button he wraps his arm around her shoulders and tugs her into him. She glances up at him, her smile wide and bright, and then the flash goes off.

     They’re staring at each other in the photo, as though the camera isn’t even there, as though no one else exists in the universe. Ward has never been a picture person, but he finds himself wanting to keep this one forever.

     “Brilliant,” Skye tells him, and then she shoves something into his mouth and says, “Chew.”

     Ward’s jaws work at the gum obediently, although he’s confused. He spits it out when Skye tells him to, and then she adds her own piece of gum to the wad and uses it to stick the new photo to the gap on her wall.

     It fits perfectly. 


	2. It's Okay To Have Sex With A Robot In A Van (If He Loves You)

 

A couple of hours later, when it’s nearly 10 PM, Ward heads over to where Skye is sitting and presses the button to power down her computer.

     “Hey!” she complains, but he just shrugs.

     “I’m not letting you disrupt your sleep cycle just because we can’t train for a few days,” he says. “Early to bed, early to rise.”

     “Whatever,” Skye grumbles. She walks over to her bag and pulls out her pyjamas.

     Suddenly, a pressing need makes itself obvious to Ward. “Uh, Skye? Is there a bathroom?”

     She snorts. “Nope.”

     Ward cannot believe that he didn’t notice such a clear structural flaw earlier. Well… crap. What is he supposed to do now? “So…”

     “You can pee outside,” Skye tells him. “We’re parked next to a bunch of bushes.” She toes off her shoes and starts to shimmy out of her jeans. “If you pee now, you don’t have to watch me stripping.”

     He could say _maybe I want to watch you stripping_ , but he doesn’t, because he doesn’t want Skye to slap him. And she would. And it would hurt. He’s seen Skye slap people before – douchey guys at bars, and once Fitz, when the rocket scientist got too enthusiastic about _boobs_ and how they could be used as a weapon of mass destruction – so he knows he never wants Skye to slap him. “Okay.” Ward slides open the van door and heads over to the bushes.

     It’s absolutely freezing out there, and pitch black. Ward briefly wonders why SHIELD don’t have cameras or agents in the bushes monitoring Skye. Then he thinks that maybe they do. He _really_ needs to go, though, so even the idea of peeing on a very pissed-off junior agent doesn’t stop him.

     When he gets back inside, Skye pushes past him. “You don’t have to strip until I get back, if you don’t want to,” she says brazenly.

     Ward could slap her, he supposes, but instead he just puts on his very-disapproving-face (as opposed to his slightly-disapproving-face or just plain-disapproving-face) and walks inside. He changes into loose pyjama bottoms and no top, because he doesn’t have a clean one and he can’t imagine Skye wanting to sleep next to his sweaty self all night.

     She comes back in just then, and there is blood gushing down her face.

     “What the hell?!” Ward exclaims. He’s shocked, but honestly not surprised, when he thinks about it. He’s actually come to expect this kind of behaviour from Skye. “What did you do?”

     “It’s dark,” she says, her voice thick and muffled by the blood in her mouth. “I tripped.”

     “Did you cut your entire face open?” Ward mutters. “Jesus, Skye, the blood!”

     “Boys are notoriously wimpy about blood,” she informs him. “It’s because they don’t have periods. Blood is nothing to me. S’fine.” She tries to wave a hand casually, but Ward grabs her wrist.

     “Where did you put the water bottles?”

     He cleans the blood off her face while they sit on the step of the van, and then they brush their teeth side-by-side and Skye decides that they will have a competition to see who can spit the furthest.

     “I grew up with a lot of boys,” she tells Ward when he gapes at her. “Spitting competitions were the only ones I could ever win, since I was at an obvious disadvantage in the peeing competitions.” She does win, too, hurling globs of toothpaste into the fateful bushes. Seriously, he really hopes there isn’t anyone in there.

     Finally, both of them traipse back inside and Ward pulls the van door closed. Skye locks it and then she stands over the bed with her hands on her hips.

     “I don’t really want to sleep on the floor,” Ward tells her.

     “I figured,” Skye agrees. “Get in, then.”

     Ward climbs into the bed and lifts the covers for her and Skye slips in beside him. He lies on his back and pulls all his limbs in close so that none of them are touching her, breathes shallowly and tells himself to fall asleep.

 

It works, because the next time Ward is aware, he’s wrapped around Skye, draped over her like some kind of blanket. His arm is tight around her waist and his face is pressed between her shoulder blades and she’s holding his wrist as though he might slip away. Their legs are all tangled together and the soft lines of her thighs are pressed against his hipbone.

     Ward rolls away from her and tiptoes out of bed. He grabs the water bottle and chugs a bit (it’s really hot in the van, for some reason) and then he has to figure out how to get back in bed without disturbing Skye. He manages it, eventually, and lies pressed up against the wall as far away from her as he can get. If Skye wakes up and finds him snuggling her _by choice_ , she will never let him live it down.

 

The next time he wakes up, Skye is lying on top of him. Not ‘oh, she’s leaning on your chest’ – no. She is seriously on top of him. Her entire body is on top of his entire body, her head tucked beneath his chin. Ward… well, he really has no idea what to do in this situation.

     “Crap,” he says. It’s probably not the best response he could have given under the circumstances.

     “Huh?” Skye questions, raising her head. Her forehead knocks sharply into his chin and they both wince. “Okay, Agent Ward, what’s going on here?” She stresses his title, which is how he knows she’s teasing. Skye rarely (if ever) uses the word ‘agent’ seriously.

     “Nothing,” Ward says immediately. “I just woke up.”

     “Uh huh, and do you take a gun to bed, or are you just happy to see me?”

     The line is clichéd, and awful, and awkward, and _bloody hell_. “I don’t sleep with a gun,” he says automatically, and then he swears and throws Skye off him and charges out of the van to take care of business. Her laughter follows him all the way to the bushes. “Damn it, Skye,” he calls back through the open door. He tries to swallow his pride. “It’s a perfectly natural male reaction. It had nothing to do with you.”

     “Of course not,” Skye replies. He knows without seeing her that she’s grinning.

     When he comes back in, she’s sitting on the bed with the soles of her feet pressed together. It makes her look childlike and sweet and that grin he’d anticipated is huge, which is why he’s so shocked at what comes out of her mouth next.

     “I’m happy to have sex with you, if you want, Ward.”

     “ _No_ ,” he says, practically shouts, before he realises she’s winding him up. He takes a deep breath and tries to come up with a witty reply. “I don’t think sex can cure a full bladder.” Yeah. Nailed it.

     Skye shrugs, “Hey, it was just an offer. You don’t have to take me up on it.”

     “Good. I won’t.”

     She cackles. “You’re such an easy mark.”

     Her hair is sticking up on one side of her head and she’s rocking back and forth with laughter, her hands wrapped around her slim ankles. She’s messy and funny and so completely _Skye_. Ward steps forward and bends down, grabs her face and kisses her, hard.

     After the first startled reaction, Skye runs her hands through his hair and clutches at his shoulders. She leans forward, melting into the kiss.

     Ward pulls away finally, panting. Skye just stares at him, eyebrows raised. Her lips are red. “Sorry,” he apologises. “I shouldn’t have – that was unprofessional.”

     She whistles through her teeth. “Damn, robot. They programmed you to know how to freaking _kiss_.”

     “You’re not angry?”

     “Hell no,” she says. “Do it again.”

     So Ward does, and at some point he winds up sitting on the bed while she’s on his lap, her arms tight around his neck and her face so close to his. It’s amazing and intense and he can’t believe he’s never done this before.

     “You know I wanted this the whole time you were making me have stupid snuggle time,” he tells her when they break apart.

     “Why do you think snuggle time is compulsory?” she demands. “I was trying to encourage you, moron.”

     “This isn’t a one-time thing, is it?” Ward stammers. He didn’t mean it to be a question. Where did this insecurity come from?

     Skye snorts. “It better not be.”

     “Good,” he says, and then he kisses her some more, just because he finally can.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, my bad. I know I said two chapters, but I just had to add a third. You'll understand why when you see it :D


	3. Stakeouts (Are Worse Than They Say)

The rookie agent has been living in a tent for the past four days, watching two people who are living in a van. He’s gonna be honest – when he joined SHIELD, he thought things would be a little more… high-tech.

     They said, when he got the assignment, that this was the one that would make or break him. He scoffed at them.

     In the past four days, he has been peed on (no, seriously), spat on, nearly stepped on (twice), had a rock thrown at his head (they weren’t _aiming_ for his head, but it still hurt) and had to listen to a god-awful amount of sex. The agents in the van started dating _less than a week ago_. He doesn’t understand why they feel the need to have so much sex (or make so much noise while they do it).

     This mission is closer to breaking him. He doesn’t think that something so unhygienic could ‘make’ anyone, except maybe make them into the most unpopular person in the Hub. Is there a way that he can get to the showers without passing through any main areas first?

     Yeah, he’s screwed. As the sound of banging (both literal and figurative) comes from the van again, he muses that at least _someone_ got something out of this mission. He'd be happy for them if he wasn't so unbelievably furious. 


End file.
